Chapter IX - Two Attorneys

Summary

CHRISTOPHER WALLIS

THE Journal of Christopher Wallis, attorney of Helston in Cornwall, gives a vivid picture of the life of an attorney in the period 1790-1815. Wallis was the eldest son of a schoolmaster. He had been articled to William Sandys, a member of a prominent family of attorneys in Helston,and was admitted to the Roll in 1769. His Journal is extremely detailed, and must have been a labour of several hours every week. All the work he did is recorded meticulously, together with long and interesting accounts of the state of the tin and copper mines and of agriculture in Cornwall during these years. At the beginning of each volume there is a survey of the main events of his year, and at the end there is usually a passage in which he reflects on events in Europe in this crowded period, and he has much to say about that ‘frantic, eccentric, clever fellow, Napoleon’. There are occasional gaps in the Journal—he did not always record his business journeys to London—but for the most part it is very full, and when it is not, there is usually an entry in which he rebukes himself for his failure, and resolves to be more painstaking in the future. And, in addition to this account of a large and varied practice, there are many passages which reveal

Wallis's attitude to his calling, and show him to have been eminently, and self-consciously, respectable, the very type of that elite of attorneys which was more and more deciding the character of the profession at the end of the century. Wallis's assiduity in compiling his journal is a reflection of the attention he devoted to his work. He rose very early—at 5, 4, even 3 o'clock, and after dealing with some correspondence at his home in Trevarno, went in to his office at Helston, and stayed there until 9 or 10 o'clock at night. On Sundays and holidays the pace.